The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee (21 page)

Unbeknownst to Alice, Nelle decided to express her own gratitude. She sent the woman a signed copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
with the inscription “Even though you have done it for my sister, you have done it for me.”

Half the fun was picturing the woman’s surprise at the mailbox. The value of an autographed copy of the novel, in dollars and in personal terms, could be a burden. Then there were times like this.

Chapter Nineteen

I
n the four months I had been renting the house next door, daily life had fallen into routines and rhythms as predictable as the noontime bells ringing out from the Methodist church on Pineville Road.

Sunday afternoons Alice left the front door open for me, and at the appointed time I slipped inside, locked the door behind me, and pulled the low rocking chair up to her recliner. I usually interviewed her for a few hours, tape recorder rolling. Before long, she would pause midsentence as I quickly flipped over the microcassettes, thirty minutes to a side. I’d press record, set down the little black recorder, and she’d resume her story exactly where she left off. I worried these sessions would become tiresome for her, but when I would say “I should let you get back to your afternoon,” her usual reply was “Not just yet, unless you need to go.” “Not just yet” often was another hour, an hour I welcomed.

On weekdays, Nelle quite often would invite me for an afternoon cup of coffee at McDonald’s. We’d sit in the booth to the left of the main door or the first table over on the right-hand side. I’d ride along as she picked up Alice after work and then made the six-minute drive to the small lake down the hill from the Community House to feed the
ducks and geese. As Nelle would slowly pull over and get the Cool Whip tub out of her trunk, the ducks would offer the kind of noisy welcome that only they can. They waddled excitedly over to the grass between the lake and the asphalt before Nelle had even stopped. They knew her car.

Sometimes Nelle and I went to the Laundromat. She knew I didn’t have a washing machine either, and invited me to tag along.

“I’m about due for a run to the Laundromat,” I would tell her when I didn’t have a shred of clean clothing left and couldn’t put it off any longer. I would offer to drive. Nelle had begun driving too close to the curb for comfort, once clipping a driveway mailbox with a loud crack she did not hear. But I knew better than to insist. Driving meant independence; it was a sensitive subject.

Nelle preferred the Laundromat one town over in Excel. I assumed this was because she was less likely to be spotted there than in Monroeville but I didn’t ask. I just showed up with my white trash bags filled with laundry and tossed them in the trunk she would have open and waiting in her driveway.

On one such trip, we chatted about the usual news and books and friends in common—as we made our way to Excel. Her mind was as sharp as ever but her vision was growing worse. Her peripheral vision was better than what she could see straight ahead. She slid into a parking spot in front of J & E Cleaners, missing the car parked in the neighboring spot by a harrowing nine or ten inches on my side of Nelle’s Buick. I sucked in my breath, held in my stomach, and tried to squeeze between the two cars.

She would be displeased if she realized she had alarmed me for a moment. We all had learned that her frustration with her vision, as well as her hearing, quickly could turn to frustration with
us.

While our laundry tumbled in the machines, we ducked next door
into the Main Street Diner and poured cream into the ceramic mugs of steaming coffee.

I told Nelle about my recent conversation with Alice about her return to Monroeville in 1945 after passing the bar exam in Birmingham. “I had two questions and we talked about it,” Alice told me of consulting her father about whether she should go home to practice. “One was: Would a small town accept a female attorney? The other was: Would I be able to establish myself or would I always be known as Mr. Lee’s daughter?”

Father and daughter weren’t sure of the answer to either question. She wanted to try and he encouraged her.

With some trepidation, Alice set up a desk in the office next to her father’s at his small law firm on the town square. She was the only woman in that profession for miles around, and as petite and polite a person as you could find.

She had her father’s love of the law, his work ethic, and a ferocious attention to detail. Alice would never describe herself that way but others did.

Nelle’s eyes began to dance as I recounted what they told me. “She did the work of six strapping men,” Nelle told me. Alice practiced law, Nelle said, “sweetly, quietly, and lethally.”

Maybe, I thought, Nelle will allow me to take notes while we spoke about this. The sisters had agreed that a book on their lives and stories was a worthwhile project for some time now. But I never knew if Nelle would be in the right mood. I was apprehensive but I set down my coffee mug and pulled the slim reporter’s notebook out of my purse. I picked up a pen and tried to give her a casual “This is okay, right?” look.

“Oh, here we go,” she said, making it clear this was not okay. Not today, anyway. I put the notebook away and set down my pen. Later,
I would make notes of the conversation and recent happenings. Nelle and I would discuss which comments I wanted to use, and which experiences with her I wanted to relate. Often, her directive was to use my own judgment. To her credit, much of what she wanted off the record was to spare the feelings of a relative or a friend.

Chapter Twenty

R
eaders have long been fascinated by Nelle’s childhood friendship with Truman Capote. Rarely in literary history have two such minds met at such a tender age. Truman served as the model for Dill and Nelle was Truman’s partner in his greatest success. Those facts alone have cemented their literary pairing in the minds of readers.

As a boy, Truman was left to spend time with his Monroeville aunts in the house right next door. Nelle’s childhood friendship with the odd, bright little playmate turned out to be a force for good and bad. At first, what unimaginable luck it was, what fun, that they had found each other as children. The imaginations of the two precocious young readers in rural Alabama fed each other years before either went on to literary fame in New York. Truman was two years older than Nelle. For children who loved stories—reading them but also making them up—such talented company was a rare find. Truman liked to hang around the Lee home, so much so, Alice told me, that her father had a routine question at the end of the day. “Has anyone put Truman out?”

Truman and Nelle Harper wrote even then, sharing an old typewriter A. C. Lee brought home from the office. One would type part
of a story, Alice recalled, and then turn the typewriter around for the other to add more.

Nelle and Alice recalled Truman not as a neglected child, suffering a miserable childhood in the care of his old-maid Monroeville aunts, as he later told it, but as the focus of their attention, a boy treated to toys and ice cream his playmates couldn’t afford. He was, Alice told me on one of our Sunday afternoons, “an indulged child.” She drew out the word
indulged,
like taffy being stretched to the breaking point.

Truman and Nelle went on to encourage each other as adult writers. Their time in Kansas was much more than a favor Nelle did for Truman. Nelle had told Capote biographer Gerald Clarke that she decided to accompany her old friend to Kansas because they shared a fascination with crime. It was, she said, “deep calling to deep.” I later learned the phrase came from a psalm. The Lees had been so steeped in the Word, those King James phrasings just came naturally to them. She and Truman recognized in each other the allure of solving a murder mystery and exploring the darkness behind it.

Even so, the differences in their personalities and experience with fame caused a divide that only widened with time. Truman’s envy of Nelle’s Pulitzer Prize, something he never achieved, was the source of a poisonous resentment. She fled the spotlight; he courted it. Nelle grew disgusted with Truman’s erratic behavior and the lying and mean streaks she said ran through him.

Nelle was offended by the speculation, never substantiated but persistent, that Capote might have had a hand in writing
Mockingbird.
“He absolutely was not involved,” Alice declared, her voice rising, as it would when she was incensed. “That’s the biggest lie ever told.” Indeed, Capote’s own letters to others regarding Nelle’s novel indicate he had no role. By the time Capote died in 1984, after a long,
drug-laden downfall, the two friends were estranged and had been for years.

In
To Kill a Mockingbird,
streaks run in families. According to Aunt Alexandra, “Everybody in Maycomb, it seemed, had a Streak: a Drinking Streak, a Gambling Streak, a Mean Streak, a Funny Streak.” In Truman’s family, according to Nelle, it was lying: “They fled from the truth as Dracula from the cross,” she said.

Alice remembered Truman from the time he was very young.

It was a Sunday and I was in the rocker, pulled up to the foot of Alice’s recliner, my hair damp with perspiration. No matter. We were in the groove.

I asked her what Truman was like as a child.

“He was a strange-lookin’ little thing. He was this blond little boy with this high-pitched voice and a vivid imagination. Other than that, he could have been any child running around. Wasn’t anything exceptional about him.”

His imagination intrigued young Nelle. He liked how hers could take flight, too. “They used to stay up in the tree house in the big chinaberry tree right out our back door, exchanging ideas, all on a childish basis.”

Truman was the only child of Lillie Mae Faulk. Lillie Mae was the oldest of five children who came to live next door when they were orphaned. She married young and had Truman when she was seventeen. She divorced and then married Joe Capote, whose name Truman took. Alice and Nelle’s mother, Frances Lee, played the piano at their wedding.

“Mother was extremely fond of Lillie Mae. And Lillie Mae had more of a relationship with my mother than she had with her married cousins. I know they read books and exchanged them, you know, things like that. Mother was a paragon to Lillie Mae.”

Nelle told me about the time a young Truman took off on an adventure. It was 1936. Truman was twelve and Nelle was ten. A girl named Martha was visiting the Rawls family across the street. She was from Milton, Florida, and four years older than Truman. Nelle said she noticed that the girl would sit out on the steps in her bathing costume. “I was jealous,” Nelle told me, “of all the time Truman was spending with Martha—the exotic older woman.”

Nelle told me to ask Alice about the details of what came next. I did.

“Truman and Martha got it in their heads that they would run away,” Alice told me. “So they hitchhiked to Evergreen and created a story about why they were traveling by themselves. The clerk at the hotel realized that something was not right and called back here to have someone retrieve them. It didn’t create that much attention around here. It was two little kids up to mischief. It was no big thing. The only big thing about it came later when both of ’em became well-known, but not for the same reason.

“It turns out that years later she had been corresponding through one of those lonely hearts kind of things in a magazine, and that was how she met this husband who ended up being her partner in crime.”

In an uncanny twist of Nelle’s and Truman’s history, Martha turned out to be a murderer. She was Martha Beck, who, with her husband, lured and robbed women who had placed personal ads in newspapers. Posing as brother and sister in the late forties, they befriended the unsuspecting victims before killing them. Known as the Lonely Hearts Killers, their crimes were sensationalized in the popular detective magazines of the day—the true-crime periodicals that both A. C. Lee and his son, Ed, devoured. Alice and Nelle also were great fans of detective stories.